In 1985, Intel faced regulatory changes, economic downturn and cheaper Japanese memory flooding the market. The founding team of Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce, and Andy Grove had built the entire company around computer memory. But memory could take them no further. History tells us they survived. In this webinar, we’ll find out how a combination of psychological safety, Andy Grove’s personality and most critically, the microprocessor team working away from headquarters who built a lifeboat Intel didn’t know it needed, preparing the company for a future it couldn’t predict or imagine.
Meanwhile in 2022, Aldi opened what the press dubbed ‘the future of retail’ in Greenwich, London. No checkouts, no scanning. Instead there were thousands of cameras, weight-sensing shelves and AI tracking every item before debiting customers’ bank accounts automatically. The experiment was Aldi’s attempt to navigate three simultaneous but related pressures: the arrival of AI, the cost-of-living crisis and spiralling labour costs. If it succeeded, they’d roll it out nationwide and transform from a price-focused discounter into a technology company. Could it work?
In this webinar, drawing from Intel’s 1985 near-death experience and Aldi’s recent experiments in Greenwich, Jamie Dobson, co-founder of Container Solutions, and author of Visionaries, Rebels and Machines, will teach participants exactly how to prepare for a future they cannot predict and how the same patterns apply now as they did in 1985. By examining case studies from both Intel and Aldi, we’ll see the link between psychological safety and survivability, which itself explains why ’going big or going home’ is the single stupidest strategy since the British High Command rejected tanks in favour of horses. We will scrutinise the capabilities that the leaders must have or quickly develop if they are to lead their companies through cloud transformation and, as we learn the lessons from Aldi, what that means in the braver, newer world of generative AI.
Date: Thursday 26th March 2026
Time: 3pm BST
How do you know you are at a strategic inflection point? What do they look like? What do they feel like? Strategic inflection points are those moments in time when not one, two or three things change but rather everything a business understands about the world is flipped upside down.
Participants will learn to write a story about their businesses set in the future but written in the present tense. This technique helps leaders create internal cohesion and external excitement.
Leaders cannot predict the future but through small, progressive investments can reserve the right to play in it. During the webinar, by analysing Intel's escape from death and Aldi's recent experiment with an artificially intelligent supermarket, participants will learn how to structure their own progressive experiments.
A company's probability of navigating a strategic inflection point is directly related to how safe their people feel to take risks, speak up and act. The seeds for survival are sown well before the crisis arrives.
Jamie Dobson is CEO and co-founder of Container Solutions, where he’s guided enterprises through cloud transformation for over a decade. He’s the author of Visionaries, Rebels and Machines: The Story of Humanity’s Extraordinary Journey from Electrification to Cloudification (2025), which traces the patterns of technological inflection points from Edison’s light bulb to Amazon’s cloud.
At Container Solutions, Jamie experienced firsthand how psychological safety determines which companies survive crises—steering the company through the COVID pandemic using the same progressive investment principles Intel used to escape their 1985 memory crisis. He writes about strategy, technological transformation and the surprising overlap between plotting a business’s future and plotting a compelling story.
